I started noticing it when I was in the late-stages of my first kink relationship. The late stage where the sex and kink die-off, you aren’t playing as often, maybe the thrill is gone or you’re in line with 2-5 other women waiting to be slotted in at the dominant’s convenience.

And then it began.

I’d stub my toe three times in one day. Bang my arm into the wall of my cubicle. Smack my head on an open cabinet, and stumble back, wincing from the sudden pain that woke me out of whatever reverie I’d been in.

The other day I was at my desk at work, grimacing over the hundreds upon hundreds of photographs of our member’s members when I decided I needed a fucking break.

I stood up and was about to push my chair back when, by the Holy Sweet trompibulating trunk of my Dear Lord Ganesha I smacked the FUCK out of my hamstring.

It hurt VERY. BADLY.

Many profanities were uttered.

My co-workers are accustomed to this sort of outburst, for various reasons. It can be something as simple as, say, watching a Member Cam Show featuring the particularly imaginative use of a big ass can of Foster’s Lager.

Look Ma! No hands!

It often is a particularly gruesome photo of a fellow pervert’s genitalia in some particularly unflattering configuration.

We get ’em all folks.

But alas, no. It wasn’t a clever rogue with a photo of his penis in a hot dog bun.

It was me, hurting myself. Again.

When I was a kid I was very clumsy. It wasn’t discovered until I started school, that this was mostly a by-product of severe Myopia and slight Astigmatism. My running into walls and falling off of curbs was curbed thereafter, but I was always a bit gangly.

Later years were plagued by similar clumsiness, but more often than not it was due to ethanol intoxication.

Been a little while since I’ve had that be a problem, and I pray every day to remain in this cleared-headed state.

But as I ruefully rubbed the insulted ankle, and did deep breathing and such in order to focus on dissipating and “processing” the pain, I though about the correlation I’ve often noticed between kinky play and self-inflicted injury.

When in a BDSM relationship, I notice the incidence of self-inflicted injury precipitously drops in the afterglow of a good hard thrashing butt whomping play-date. Have you noticed this yourself, my dear fellow Masochists? Or am I, again, the Lone Freak?

Sometimes weeks would go by then it would start again. I’d be in rehearsal, and within a 4 hour period I would poke myself with a pencil, stumble over a chair, run into a prop, drop a pig-skull on my foot*.

It got so that my non-kink-identified friends would be all “Jesus Mo. Go get your ass beaten. Really. This is ridiculous.”

And sure enough, if I did what I could to fulfil that gnawing, I’d be accident free for a stretch again.

Nowadays, I am not attached, so the play is…well.

Infrequent?

Yes.

And the bumps, she small scrapes, the nail caught on flesh that leaves welts….they do their best to remind this body that we are alive and in this body.

It doesn’t replace the crack hiss and sting of a whip thrown at the speed of sound, or a needle silent whisper through skin.

Identities. I do not even feel compelled to list them all lest they take on the glib slickness I am striving to escape even now.

I do not want to be looked at.

I need to be seen.

And using attitude as costuming, my history as the stage, this blog as the lights, and my defenses at the makeup might make for a great show.

hold for applause

But when the paint comes off and the smoke clears out and the house is dark, all I am left with is the ghost light that bear-baits fear.

Fear of being alone. Fear that I have / am forgotten. Fear that I have no fucking idea what the hell I am talking about.

I am single, right? I have had that check mark ticked on my profiles for a while now. No, I do not know what tomorrow holds and, sure! Yeah! The love of my life could even now be 45 hours away from walking into me on the corner of Mission and 3rd. Or it could be I don’t met them until I’m 45.

The point is, I don’t know.

And with that I am, usually, content.

But the body I’m inhabiting at present has its own ideas. It roams hungry. It wants to be touched, fed, opened. It wants all manner of lotions, unguents, tiny curved pieces of silicone to help its failed attempts at vision. Barring that, it insists on a rig of plastic and hinges to sit on its face so that it wont run into shit or fall down. It wants pizza too, but can’t digest it, so then it insists on pills to assist in that process. It wants to be somewhere else. It wants to hide. It needs to be touched. Sometimes very roughly. Sometimes so cruelly that it wonders why it is in this situation again, please..? For a long time it wanted to stop feeling so deeply. It enjoyed, then wanted, then craved, then needed, than was addicted to, alcohol which was for a time, highly effective at suffocating the emotional stomata that choked on bottle after bottle of whiskey.

Then it decided it wanted to live. and a curious thing happened. it stopped wanting destructing, oblivion, a dissolution. It stopped feeling the need to erase.

And today it wants, most of all, to never ever be so adrift that nothingness feels like a viable option ever ever ever again.

And so we have turned from that.

That path is a haze distant illusion that is illusory in its distance because it is the parallel ghost road that isn’t far no not fucking bloody far at all my friend. “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road,” grinds my addiction, slavering and starved with jaws all the more terrifying because they have been denied “…take the high road and I’ll skulk this low road and if you ever ever decide to come back down here we can walk again no problemo no problem I’ll wait if you decide to come on down…”

But I do not.

So much of what I want is shifting in the bumps of this journey. Packing crates of lust desire and perversion collide against delicious sick fucked up reality even more fucked up that fantasy for its meat solidity.

But it fades. All desires. All desires fade. That is what they do. Entropy Sucks.

I look at a former play partner and a tiny shock reverberates and I am confounded because it isn’t longing it isn’t wistfulness it isn’t remorse it is amazement at what WAS. That which has gone on before. Shit I thought I’d always have and always want is now in a new limbo.

I look at a potential play partner and I think “Why?”

Right at this moment the idea of someone hitting me sends my mind calmly to a soft dark place where a stiletto looms before me handle toward my hand cold and ready to sink silently into the throat of anyone fucking dumb enough to touch me. Stepping razor. Don’t you watch my size…I’m dangerous.

But isn’t that what we need? Don’t we need that anymore?

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

And that empty questioning might be all manner of Zen but it is a cold ringing chime that doesn’t really comfort me much.

Not at all, really.

Because In order to see if that is what I need, I need to have before me solid and breathing the person for whom receiving that deeply is natural. effortless. unfettered.